Michael Deacon reviews this week's TV including Stephen Hawking: A Brief
History of Mine (Channel 4), Derren Brown: the Great Art Robbery (Channel 4)
and Sports Personality of the Year at 60 (BBC One)

Stephen Hawking is a brilliant man, but not so brilliant that he can work out how to explain his discoveries to someone as dim as I am. That would be a feat beyond even his intellectual powers. “The universe just came into existence all by itself,” he said, matter-of-factly, in Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Mine (last Saturday, Channel 4).

Picture me, dear reader, as the pitiful grey slop I am ashamed to call my mind strove in vain to compute this no doubt perfectly straightforward concept. The frown of gorilla-like incomprehension, the grunt of valiant but doomed struggle. Because if the universe just came into existence all by itself, that means that before the universe, there was nothing. And if there was nothing, there were no materials with which to create the universe. Which means that…

Luckily for me, A Brief History of Mine didn’t contain a huge amount in the way of cosmology or theoretical physics. It was mainly about Professor Hawking’s life. His insatiably enthusiastic childhood (he introduced plumbing and electric lighting to his sister’s doll house); his undergraduate frolics at Oxford (he claims to have done no more than an hour’s work a day, although naturally this didn’t stop him emerging with a First); his diagnosis, at the age of 21, with motor neurone disease; marriage and divorce, scientific triumphs, 10 million books sold, global fame. (We saw footage of him at a party, his carer spoon-feeding him champagne.)

The programme was narrated by Hawking himself. This was a pleasure, because I love his voice. “What really made a difference was falling in love with a girl called Jane Wilde, whom I met about the same time I was diagnosed. This gave me something to live for.” Those words on their own would be moving enough, but recited by a computer they gain an otherworldly mystery and magic, haunting but at the same time uplifting. It feels like listening to a kind of sci-fi poetry.

But, although he talked about the love he’d felt for Jane, the story of their divorce was told mainly by her. “We were swept away by this great wave of fame and fortune. It all got rather too much for me to cope with and I suppose that’s when we ceased to be as happy as we had been. And when the marriage broke up, I felt not just as if a rug had been pulled out from under my feet, but as if the earth had opened up under that rug and swallowed me. Because the marriage had been my raison d’être. It took me quite a little while to recover a sense of my own identity.”

That was her version of events. His was more succinct. “It was clear that my life and Jane’s were beginning to follow different paths. In 1990 we separated and were divorced in 1995.”

Anyway, it was a fascinating account of a fascinating life. One of the main things to take away from it was that Hawking can be very funny. “There’s nothing like the eureka moment of discovering something no one knew before. I won’t compare it to sex. But it lasts longer.”

How much do you trust Derren Brown? The trouble is, he’s so brilliantly calculating, that when things go wrong in his shows I assume they were meant to. In Derren Brown: the Great Art Robbery (last night, Channel 4) he was grooming a group of pensioners to be thieves. At first, the pensioners were largely hopeless at it. But if they’d been instantly good at it, that would have killed the programme’s suspense (ultimately he wanted them to steal a £1 million painting from a gallery). The pensioners’ ineptitude created a sense of jeopardy. So presumably he was on purpose setting them tasks they would struggle with, then, for the sake of the camera, pretending to look worried when they did so. (“That really didn’t go as planned…”)

Then he explained in detail how the theft of the painting was to be carried out. Now they were certain to balls it up, because you only explain a trick like this afterwards, not before. They did indeed balls it up. But then it turned out that, at his instigation, they’d only pretended to balls it up; appearing to balls it up, in fact, gave them the necessary cover to carry out the theft. By going wrong the plan had gone right.

It was all plotted superbly. My only complaint is about the absence of Derren’s goatee. That goatee made him look appropriately devilish. Now he just has silvery stubble and looks almost human. Frankly, it’s unsettling.

Sports Personality of the Year at 60 (Wednesday, BBC One) began with a quote from last year’s winner,Sir Bradley Wiggins. The Sports Personality of the Year trophy, he said, “is probably the most iconic trophy in sport”. Which I suppose is true, if you don’t count the football World Cup, the Ashes urn, the Ryder Cup, the Webb Ellis Cup, the America’s Cup, and the Champions League trophy. Later in the programme, though, we discovered that the producers had edited him unfairly. His full quote was: “I think it’s probably the most iconic trophy in sport. In British sport, anyway.” So that means we only have to discount the FA Cup, the Premier League trophy, the Wimbledon men’s cup and women’s rosewater dish, the Claret Jug and the Calcutta Cup.

For reasons that were never supplied, Gary Lineker presented this retrospective from inside an almost entirely dark warehouse.

It looked like the sort of place you might expect to find yourself tied up and tortured. In the event, you weren’t tied up, but you were shown footage from the Seventies of Kevin Keegan’s perm and chocolate-brown tie, so your intuition was half-right. Keegan, incidentally, looked genuinely desolate at finishing only third behind Seb Coe and Ian Botham in 1979. And Lineker himself complained about not even making the top three in 1986, the year he was the leading scorer at the World Cup. Maybe it is the most iconic trophy in sport.

There was a lovely line by George Best, collecting the Lifetime Achievement award at the 2002 ceremony, three years before he died. “When they were doing [my liver transplant], the surgeon was a little bit worried as they were running out of blood. I was in for 10 hours and had 40 pints. Beating my previous record by 20 minutes.”